Annotated Chinese Reader

Our own evolution guided us into creating and adapting to different cultures around the globe which rely on particular languages. It’s close to impossible to know all of them by heart, but there are various specialized applications like Annotated Chinese Reader which help you translate and even hear spoken words, this one dedicated to Chinese.

The application takes a little while to get installed, and is ready without having to go through a system restart. You find it quietly sitting in the tray area, but there’s also a corresponding desktop object you can drag around and is used to trigger translation, and even speech.

Clipboard is used as input, so triggering translation merely requires you to copy a bit of text and use the floating object to translate. Note that the copied word needs to be Chinese for the operation to be successful. It’s a good idea to copy only Chinese characters, because you might end up with the program not able to properly translate.

It’s of little consequence where text is copied from, as long as it’s Chinese. An information window shows up, displaying the selected text, as well as the translation. You can choose to have text spoken to you, and it’s possible to do this in both English and Chinese.

You have the liberty of keeping the information window up at all times, even if you’re momentarily done with translation. The source field can be edited at any moment, while the desktop object also allows you to save speech as WAV file on your computer through the context menu.

Speech can be enabled for when you press the desktop object button. Speech can be looped, and you can set the speed and volume. You can pick different voices for Chinese and English from the Preferences panel.

Annotated Chinese Reader is a neat tool to have around, especially when you often have to deal with Chinese text. It’s also a neat tool to learn Chinese, thanks to built-in text-to-speech components, which make it possible to save as a WAV file.